Nearly a year after suspending its search, Kansas City will again seek a new fire chief
Nearly one year after he suspended Kansas City’s search for a new fire chief, City Manager Brian Platt will repost the job next week, Platt said Friday in his weekly internal newsletter to City Council members, an excerpt of which was obtained by The Star.
The move comes nearly two years after Donna Lake resigned as chief in January 2023 and 11 months after Platt paused the search for her replacement last December.
At the time, he told council members in another newsletter that he was halting the search “for a few months” so that the city could complete labor contract negotiations with Local 42 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents most KCFD employees with the rank of captain or below.
But those labor negotiations stretched on much longer than anticipated. The contract wasn’t approved until mid-August and includes a clause that revokes future firefighters’ right to sue the department for discrimination and instead requires such claims to go through an internal process called arbitration.
In this week’s edition of “City Manager updates,” Platt cited that delay and the death of a firefighter in a training exercise last month as the reason the city waited until now to restart the search for a new fire chief.
“Next week we will re-release the posting for KCFD chief after an intentional pause to ensure stability during the Local 42 union negotiations process (which took much longer than anticipated) and then also after the loss of a firefighter,” Platt wrote in the newsletter excerpt. He went onto praise Ross Grundyson, who Platt named as Lake’s interim replacement in January 2023 and has since then dropped the word interim from his title without any explanation.
“Chief Grundyson has been one of this City’s best Fire Chiefs and we are all so grateful for his service,” Platt wrote. “He has done so much to both better support firefighers and improve our responsiveness and service delivery, and we thank him for sticking around a bit longer than he anticipated to take this role.
“We don’t have a deadline to make a decision necessarily but we will keep everyone posted on progress and next steps.”
Assistant City Manager Melissa Kozakiewicz confirmed the authenticity of the excerpt from the newsletter, which the city does not consider a record open to the public as it is an “internal” communication between Platt and the council.
She, too, praised Grundyson’s management of the department.
But the amount of time he has directed the department on what was to be an interim basis has sparked criticism and confusion as to whether he remained “interim” chief or was quietly promoted to chief earlier this year, despite lacking the college degree that the initial job posting said was required for the job.
As The Star reported last month, potential applicants were told they would not be considered for the permanent chief position if they applied for the interim position. Several of them had hired attorneys who were taking the procedural steps necessary to file discrimination lawsuits, and many of them were women or people of color who more than met the minimum qualifications to be chief. Grundyson is white and, while he did attend college, he did not earn a bachelor’s degree.
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Whatever his title, Grundyson has served in the job far longer than any other interim chief in modern history.
“They did not apply for interim chief because they were told they could not be chief (if they did),” a lawyer for one of them told The Star for that story. “The procedures and application process (the city) set out is appalling.”
Grundyson has been with department 29 years and is eligible for retirement.
The KCFD has long been accused of bias and favoritism in its hiring and promotion practices, as well as fostering a hostile work environment for those not part of the white, male demographic group that has shaped the department’s culture for many decades, according to a report the city commissioned after The Star published a series of articles in 2020 about racism and sexism within the KCFD.
That series also prompted an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice investigation into whether the fire department is “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination against Black individuals” in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
